Jonathan Meades

UK television presenter, known for his idiosyncratic documentaries about places and their architecture.

He is an Honorary Associate of the UK's National Secular Society and a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.

Meades set out his strongly atheistic position in the Sunday Telegraph March 2, 1997.

He followed this up in his television program Modern Times which the contributor writes was as much an attack on the Church of England as God: "The churches got it wrong. The punters wanted more mumbo-jumbo, not less."

In an interview for the Rationalist Association, he spoke at length about his views on religion:

"To believe in God strikes me as being like believing that the Earth is flat. I think there was an excuse for it; I don’t think there is an excuse for it now. I think really anyone who practises religion should not be allowed to hold public office, because, as David Hume said, they’re suffering from sick men’s dreams.”

“I’m hostile. I'm not particularly angry. Well, no. It does anger me. What angers me is the special pleading, and this idea that there can be no morality without religion, which I think is absolute balls. Complete balls. I think it’s the other way round. I can’t see that religion does anyone any good whatsoever."

"Both my parents had Christian burials. My mother was talked into it by a vicar, and I did find offensive at both my parents’ funerals the way in which it’s all about God. It’s not about the person who’s died. You know: Jesus wanted this, you’re doing this in the name of the Lord, the name of the spirit, the name of the fucking Trinity. [...] It’s offensive, the way that it gets brought into something which is so potentially emotionally harrowing as a funeral, and obviously one of the problems with death is that it is shunted away now."